Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,16
would ever be. Allison had run from the room in tears. Everyone else sat there like they hadn’t heard her. My mother said later that if they’d all stopped eating every time my grandmother said something honest but awful, they would have starved to death before they were ten.
There were no pictures of my mother’s wedding on my grandmother’s wall. The pictures of her stopped at sixteen. There was my mother, wispy and young-looking, eyes wide open and surprised. I imagined her daydreaming before the photo was snapped. It wasn’t long after that when my mother took off on a road trip across the country with friends who imagined themselves hippies. Some of these people were still my mother’s friends, and in one of their houses I had seen pictures from that summer: my mother laughing and making faces in the backseat, my mother sleeping on a beach somewhere. My mother didn’t talk about that summer. While she was off with her friends, my grandfather was killed when his small plane encountered a tropical storm and crashed.
In my grandmother’s butterfly theory, my mother was the moth who flapped her wings in Japan and caused disaster; there was an inevitable correlation between her being in the wrong place at the wrong time and my grandfather’s untimely accident. I had been given this secret knowledge too early to know what to do with it. I was old enough to know better than to prod my mother with questions, but too young to understand debt and obligation. Too young to understand what my mother must have felt during her mother’s fight with cancer, or to appreciate the uncertainty my grandmother must have been living with. I was too young to understand that a python could be not just a threat but a warning, and too young to understand why this summer, of all summers, I had been sent off as a flawed peace offering.
Allison got impatient with my refusal to leave the living room. She tried to reason with me: “If a snake wanted to eat us, wouldn’t it have done it already? If a starving python was living in our lake, wouldn’t all the other animals be dead by now?” I wanted to believe her, but then I pictured myself being crushed into fine dust inside of something so big that no one could hear me scream, vanishing without my parents ever knowing what had happened. When logic failed, Allison retrieved my copy of Natural Wonders of the Amazon Rain Forest from where it lay abandoned and pointed out pictures of snake after snake.
“Look,” she said, pointing at a picture of a man with a large yellow snake wrapped around his shoulders, two women in the background looking unphased. “All these people who live with snakes, and they haven’t been eaten. Your parents are with these snakes right now, and they’re not dead.”
“How do you know?” I asked. They’d told me before leaving that by a month into the summer, they would be unreachable, leaving Rio for the dense territory of the rain forest, a place where they neither sent nor received letters.
Allison gave up on me after that. She stopped letting me sleep on the bottom bunk; she began to tease me about my fears. I made a new amulet out of one of Allison’s barrettes and a friendship bracelet she had given me; Allison demanded the barrette back and, when I refused, ripped the bracelet in half. My phobia was taking a greater toll on her than boredom. Being inside meant she had to spend more time in the direct presence of my grandmother. My grandmother quizzed Allison incessantly about her grades, pulled her into the study to review brochures for day schools she wanted Allison to be prepared to apply to next summer. Allison’s credentials sorely disappointed her; makeup theft and an active imagination were apparently not among the early markers of genius. Her grades were not great, and her school records were dotted with minor citations: Allison talked back to teachers, Allison poured glue in someone’s hair, Allison stole the class turtle to keep as a pet. When I overheard my grandmother grilling Allison over these infractions, I shimmered with a kind of pride in her boldness, but Allison’s explanations were alarmingly meek. Even my grandmother noticed that Allison seemed to get in some sort of trouble every time her parents left for a vacation, which they did often, year-round, but Allison refused to admit to the correlation.